As many of you have noticed, we have been a bit quiet on the Sync front after releasing our first Sync-enabled Snapshot. The feedback from that Snapshot was very positive overall and I want to thank everyone who took the time to test it.

But, as many of you noticed at the time, our server code was not fully up to the task when it came to handling the large traffic we got from the numerous Snapshot users. We quickly found ways to prop it up to handle the load, but we knew this was not good enough for a Stable release.

We spent the last three months rethinking and reimplementing our server-side architecture in a way that should be a lot more solid. So, if we haven’t talked much about Sync lately, it’s because I was really busy writing a lot of server code. I hope that the result will have been worth the wait.

Moving on

Hlini is now ready to flip the switch and put this new Sync server implementation to the test. Because of the number of changes we have done, we have decided to completely reset our database.

What does this mean for those of you using Sync in Snapshot? When the change occurs, you will be logged out of Sync and you will need to log in again once or twice (depending on the state of your client). Afterwards, all of your data will be synced from scratch. I am aware that this might be pretty inconvenient to some, but it is the only completely safe way to handle the transition.

Timeline for the database reset

The switchover will take place today, March 7, at 14:00 UTC (15:00 CET). Once we switch, please let us know in the comments here if you are seeing any new issues or – better still – if it solved some of the issues you were seeing! Once again, I will be monitoring the feedback (and the server status) closely.

Note that we will keep the old server and its database alive for 14 days from the time of the switchover in case anyone would need access to the old sync data. All the data on the old system will be destroyed afterwards.If all goes well with this change, you can look forward to Sync being made available in a final release soon.

What is Sync and who is it for?

Is this the first time you hear of Sync? Then read on.

The synchronization function allows you to keep your data synchronized between different instances of the Vivaldi browser. This includes Bookmarks, stored passwords, Notes and more. That means you can use Vivaldi to bookmark a page on one computer and then go on to use Vivaldi on another computer and find your bookmarked page available there shortly afterward.

Aside from the work done in the Vivaldi browser itself, Sync involves a lot of infrastructure from our side. Our Sync implementation is based on the synchronization engine that is exposed by the Chromium source code. We have tailored that engine to our needs, in large part to ensure that any data you synchronize is encrypted end-to-end, but also to allow us to support additional data types over time.